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BBC: I want to do my job says Blunkett (06-Dec-04)
… A Home Office spokesman said: "The Opposition should wait until the inquiry has reported before they decide that David [Blunkett] should resign. Like anyone else, he is entitled to the presumption of innocence."
BBC: UK urged to review terrorism laws (27-Nov-04)
The UK government has been urged to review its policy of detaining foreign terror suspects without trial, by the United Nations Committee on Torture.
Postscript: Guilty as charged.
Hands up who remembers me being rather unkind about a poem about the passenger pigeon that appeared in the London Review of Books in August. Basically, I accused the poet of having cut various factoids about the passenger pigeon from assorted books and websites, and pasted them into a ready-made 'poem'. To show how easy I thought it was, I then used the same technique to generate my own poetic masterpiece about Bolivia.
Well, all joking aside, it turns out I was right: Mark Ford, the assembler of the passenger pigeon poem, has written an article in the latest edition of the LRB, entitled Love and Theft, in which he tries to draw a line between bricolage (a new word for me) and plagiarism. Here is a little bricolage of my own, formed from some of the choicest snippets of Ford's article [my emphasis added]:
…Already web skills are playing an important role in the evolutionary struggle for survival. Will future historians turn first to the wrist and clicking finger in assessing a corpse from our era? Will those who develop RSI be the information revolution’s lepers? How soon before our relatively recently acquired skills become as obsolete as the ability to kill a mammoth with a spear or write shorthand or programme a VCR?
I found myself pondering all this while writing a poem about the demise of the passenger pigeon, which was published in the LRB (5 August)…
[M]y experience of swooping down and roosting on various websites in search of facts about the passenger pigeon brought to mind another [Wallace] Stevens poem, ‘A Postcard from the Volcano’, which is also concerned with extinction:
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill…The children blithely picking up the bones of their ancestors, unaware of and indifferent to the sensual fullness of being they once enjoyed, seemed to me to act in a way analogous to my behaviour in cyberspace, hopping from site to site, converting whatever I picked up to a flickering simulacrum of itself, to what Stevens, in the same poem, calls ‘a tatter of shadows’…
My passenger pigeon poem acknowledges that the information it contains has been gleaned from the internet, but it also deploys the Sterne/Burton defence by taking in some allusions, including…
[And so on.]
At the risk of being even unkinder to Mr Ford than I already have been, I couldn't help wondering whether this internet-hopping poet hadn't, perhaps, searched Google for comments about his passenger pigeon poem, come across my article (which is currently on the first page of hits), and thought to himself Bloody hell! The gaff's blown! I've been rumbled! I'd better write a piece acknowledging my cut and paste job before this thing goes ballistic! (or words to that effect).
But, no, I think that would be being a little bit too unkind.
I'm confused. A senior government minister admits to having had an affair with a married woman, and claims to have got her pregnant twice. Isn't he supposed to resign now? Isn't he supposed to resign, irrespective of whether the allegations of his misusing his ministerial powers to get his ex-lover a cheap immigrant nanny turn out to be true? That's what they used to do in the old days, when I were a nipper: resign. Those who didn't were charged with sleaze by the minister's own party.
Instead, we are all supposed to feel sorry for David Blunkett. The British media are being unbelievably kind to him. Indeed, the BBC has even felt it necessary to justify covering the story at all (they've learnt their lesson all right). And get this: not one of the British tabloids—not even the Times—has coined the word Visagate yet. I know this for a fact: I just searched for it on Google news and got zero hits. Remember, you heard it here first.
But what is perhaps most amazing about all the soft-hitting media coverage of The Blunkett Affair is that absolutely nobody has pointed out the real news story here. Not one of the newspapers or TV bulletins has drawn attention to the unbeleaguered Home Secretary's uncanny resemblance to the actor Peter O'Toole in the 1968 film, The Lion in Winter. It's not just the beard. Look at those eyes. Look at that mouth. David Blunkett is Peter O'Toole! Totally uncanny.
Like I said, you heard it here first.
That old tosser, Fitz, was 50 on Tuesday. That's right, fifty.
By way of a celebration/commiseration, I met him and his latest wife in The Dispensary pub in Birkenhead that evening.
Since we were last at The Dispensary, about six weeks ago, the place seems to have adopted a jet-ski theme. This was something of a first for me. But that's not the only thing that's changed in the last six weeks. Since I last saw them, Fitz and Ms Fitz—neither of them Roman Catholics (nor at all religious, come to mention it)—have both, quite independently, started working for nuns.
(I'm not making this up.)
Fitz has been teaching Nigerian nuns numeracy and literary skills. Ms Fitz has been tidying-up in an old nuns' home.
(I'm really not making this up.)
One of the nuns in the old nuns' home is named Sister Finbar. There is also a Sister Thomas More, and a Sister Gertrude. But my personal favourite is…
(I'm really not making this up.)
Sister Mount Etna.
(No, I wouldn't believe me either.)
Conversation with Jen:
R: You know what your problem is?
J: What's that?
R: You only have two speeds: flat-out or fast-asleep.
J: You mean flat-out or flat-out?
Now I don't claim to know much about art, but I know what's shite.
Jen and I visited the Tate Modern in London with Ann and Bill yesterday. Much of the stuff on display was, as you might expect, total rubbish. Between you and me, we kind of suspected that the artists in question were taking the piss. But, every now and again, we'd spot a genuine masterpiece across the room and go over for a closer look. Almost invariably, the piece in question turned out to be by some bloke named Picasso.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not a total philistine when it comes to modern art. In fact, I quite like some of it: I often pop into the Liverpool Tate during my lunch breaks, and Jen and I have Mondrian, Pollock, and Hockney prints (and four original Pickles) on our walls at home. But having an open mind when it comes to modern art doesn't mean you shouldn't dismiss bullshit as bullshit when you see it.
Anyhow, be that as it may, yesterday I came up with an idea for a new game, henceforth to be known as The Modern Art Gallery Game. It's very easy to play. All you need to do is go into a modern art gallery, find something that isn't actually an exhibit—a fire extinguisher, say, or a donation box—and stand looking admiringly at it, as if you think it's a genuine exhibit. It's even better if you can get somebody else to join in.
If anyone asks you what the hell you're doing, claim to be a performance artist, performing a piece entitled, But Is It Art?
They'll probably leave you alone after that.
Carolyn sent me a text message last night, informing me that Mr Gibson had died.
Mr Gibson was the elderly Scottish gentleman who lived next door to Carolyn when she and I were growing up in Alistair Drive. I didn't know him very well, but he always stopped to shout 'Hello!' when he was out walking his dog. Mr Gibson was very hard of hearing.
After we went off to our respective universities, Carolyn and I didn't see each other for a couple of years. We re-established contact at a surprise 80th birthday party that our parents threw for Mr Gibson. It was at this party that I learnt that Mr Gibson had been a prisoner of war, and had worked on the Burma Railway. He never forgave the Japanese, and mildly chastised me when I bought my second car: a Nissan.
It wasn't until three years ago that I learnt from Carolyn that Mr Gibson's name was Alistair. She just matter-of-factly slipped it into the conversation one day. Apparently, she and Mr Gibson were now on first name terms. It didn't seem right, her referring to Mr Gibson as 'Alistair'. When I told my parents, they were surprised I hadn't known his name all along, because, in a way, our road had been named after him:
In 1963, my parents, and Carolyn's parents, and Mr Gibson all put down deposits on houses that were being built in a new road that was to be named 'Alastair Drive'. But Mr Gibson took great exception to this, and went to complain to the local planning department. He explained that 'Alastair' was a damn stupid way to spell the name 'Alistair', and demanded they change it. So they did.
Mr Gibson might have lived a loud and unassuming life, but I guess he's the only person I'm ever likely to meet who lived in a road named in his honour.
As usual, I listened to a number of CDs today.
As unusual, in a fit of unforgivable nostalgia, I am, as I type, listening to a classic album on vinyl (remember that?).
Just for the record (pun intended), after all these years, vinyl still knocks CD into a cocked hat. If you're after warm and mellow—as everyone should be—digital simply doesn't cut it.
Vinyl is groovy.
No, I haven't the faintest idea what it means either. From what I can gather, it's Iranian. But, if you scroll down to the end of the article, you will see:
This internet thing is totally bonkers.
The mind utterly, utterly boggles:
New Scientist: Superman too super a role model
Superman is too good a role model. Fans of the man from Krypton unwittingly compare themselves to the superhero, and realise they do not measure up. And as a result, they are less likely to help other people.
Presumably, they're also less likely to attempt to fly.
